In this article, we investigate the possibility of cross-language communication using a synergy of words and pictures on mobile devices. Communicating with only pictures is in itself a very powerful strategy, but is limited in expressiveness. On the other hand, words can express everything you could wish to say, but they are cumbersome to work with on mobile devices, and need to be translated in order for their meaning to be understood. Automatic translations can contain errors that pervert the communication process, and this may undermine the users’ confidence when expressing themselves across language barriers. Our idea is to create a user interface for cross-language communication that uses pictures as the primary mode of input, and words to express the detailed meaning. This interface creates a visual process of communication that occurs on two heterogeneous channels that can support each other. We implemented this user interface as application on the Apple iPad tablet, and performed a set of experiments to determine its usefulness as a translation aid for travellers.

In this paper, we present a language-independent method for the automatic, unsupervised extraction of non-content words from a corpus of documents. This method permits the creation of word lists that may be used in place of traditional function word lists in various natural language processing tasks. As an example we generated lists of words from a corpus of English, Chinese, and Russian posts extracted from Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia Wikitalk discussion pages. We applied these lists to the task of authorship attribution on this corpus to compare the effectiveness of lists of words extracted with this method to expert-created function word lists and frequent word lists (a common alternative to function word lists). hLDA lists perform comparably to frequent word lists. The trials also show that corpus-derived lists tend to perform better than more generic lists, and both sets of generated lists significantly outperformed the expert lists. Additionally, we evaluated the performance of an English expert list on machine translations of our Chinese and Russian documents, showing that our method also outperforms this alternative.

In 2007 we presented a paper that described the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Translation (MT) for the automated translation of process build instructions from English to other languages to support Ford's assembly plants in non-English speaking countries. This project has continued to evolve with the addition of new languages and improvements to the translation process. However, we discovered that there was a large demand for automated language translation across all of Ford Motor Company and we decided to expand the scope of our project to address these requirements. This paper will describe our efforts to meet all of Ford's internal translation requirements with AI and MT technology and focus on the challenges and lessons that we learned from applying advanced technology across an entire corporation.

In 2007 we presented a paper that described the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Translation (MT) for the automated translation of process build instructions from English to other languages to support Ford’s assembly plants in non-English speaking countries. This project has continued to evolve with the addition of new languages and improvements to the translation process. However, we discovered that there was a large demand for automated language translation across all of Ford Motor Company and we decided to expand the scope of our project to address these requirements. This paper will describe our efforts to meet all of Ford’s internal translation requirements with AI and MT technology and focus on the challenges and lessons that we learned from applying advanced technology across an entire corporation.

We describe an approach for multi-engine machine translation that uses machine learning methods to train one or several classifiers for a given set of candidate translations. Contrary to existing approaches in quality estimation which only consider a single translation at a time, we explicitly model pairwise comparison with our feature vectors. We discuss several challenges our method is facing and discuss how lifelong machine learning could be applied to resolve these. We also show how the proposed architecture can be extended to allow human feedback to be included into the training process, improving the system's selection process over time.

Although, Chinese and Spanish are two of the most spoken languages in the world, not much research has been done in machine translation for this language pair. This paper focuses on investigating the state-of-the-art of Chinese-to-Spanish statistical machine translation (Smt), which nowadays is one of the most popular approaches to machine translation. For this purpose, we report details of the available parallel corpus which are Basic Traveller Expressions Corpus (Btec), Holy Bible and United Nations (Un). Additionally, we conduct experimental work with the largest of these three corpora to explore alternative Smt strategies by means of using a pivot language. Three alternatives are considered for pivoting: cascading, pseudo-corpus and triangulation. As pivot language, we use either English, Arabic or French. Results show that, for a phrase-based Smt system, English is the best pivot language between Chinese and Spanish. We propose a system output combination using the pivot strategies which is capable of outperforming the direct translation strategy. The main objective of this work is motivating and involving the research community to work in this important pair of languages given their demographic impact.

The performance of a Statistical Machine Translation System (SMT) system is proportionally directed to the quality and length of the parallel corpus it uses. However for some pair of languages there is a considerable lack of them. The long term goal is to construct a Japanese-Spanish parallel corpus to be used for SMT, whereas, there are a lack of useful Japanese-Spanish parallel Corpus. To address this problem, In this study we proposed a method for extracting Japanese-Spanish Parallel Sentences from Wikipedia using POS tagging and Rule-Based approach. The main focus of this approach is the syntactic features of both languages. Human evaluation was performed over a sample and shows promising results, in comparison with the baseline.

Research over the past years has shown that machine translation results can be greatly enhanced with the help of mono- or bilingual human contributors, e.g. by asking hu- mans to proofread or correct outputs of machine translation systems. However, it remains difficult to determine the quality of individual revisions. This paper proposes a meth- od to determine the quality of individual contributions by analyzing task-independent data. Examples of such data are completion time, number of keystrokes, etc. An initial evaluation showed promising F-measure values larger than 0.8 for support vector machine and decision tree based classifications of a combined test set of Vietnamese and German translations.

In 2007 we presented a paper that described the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Translation (MT) for the automated translation of process build instructions from English to other languages to support Ford’s assembly plants in non-English speaking countries. This project has continued to evolve with the addition of new languages and improvements to the translation process. However, we discovered that there was a large demand for automated language translation across all of Ford Motor Company and we decided to expand the scope of our project to address these requirements. This paper will describe our efforts to meet all of Ford’s internal translation requirements with AI and MT technology and focus on the challenges and lessons that we learned from applying advanced technology across an entire corporation.

With the advent of the increasingly participatory Internet and the growing power of the crowd, “Serious Games” have proven to be a fertile approach for gathering task-specific natural language data at very low cost. In this paper we outline a game we call Doodling, based on the sketch-and-convey metaphor used in the popular board game Pictionary(R), with the goal of generating useful natural language data. We explore whether such a paradigm can be successfully extended for conveying more complex syntactic and semantic constructs than the words or short phrases typically used in the board game. Through a series of user experiments, we show that this is indeed the case, and that valuable parallel language data may be produced as a byproduct. In addition, we explore extensions to this paradigm along two axes – going online (vs. face-to-face) and going cross-lingual. The results in each of the sets of experiments confirm the potential of Doodling game to generate data in large quantities and across languages, and thus provide a new means of developing data sets and technologies for resource-poor languages.